and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Inexplicably, the list of weblogs I am attached to, when I log into Blogger, is ordered differently when I am here at work. Everyone else, whether IE or Firefox, whether Safari or Netscape, it is always the same. Here at work with Firefox? Different.

Okay, things haven't been exciting around here lately. I know. I'm trying an experiment. It's called: blog about my daily life. I've realized I don't give my day-to-day quite like a lot of bloggers do, and I sort of stick to the waxing of philosophical garbage. A bit esoteric if you don't know me well, I imagine.. but the more I blog about my day-to-day the more I question the worth of blogging. I can at least go back a year and read some bullshit post of mine about the purpose of life and maybe get something out of it: agree with it or decide I'm an Aho. But this day-to-day, it's unreadable. Three weeks from now reading a post of mine that says "I drank a lot of coffee today".. well.. suck. I don't have time for that. I'm too busy drinking a lot of coffee.

So bear with me as the format gets tossed around here. I kind of like that one of the beauties of blogging is that there is no format.. you can do whatever the hell you want. I like it and I hate it. There is no forced coherence. Good, or bad? I wonder. I think the best crazy writers of our time that have been heard have been heard because there was some forced form to their words. In order to sell the book they had to present it as such to the publishers. It had to have some sense of a familiar frame about it - even if it was a false one. OOorrr maybe that's all bullshit. I really don't know what I'm talking about.

Secret: I never do.

So I shall return to the day to day for now. I'm back in the warm fuzzy glow of office space work. That place where tiny fans hum and whir like insects and everything has a manufactured aura about it - the rugs are purpley with a speckled pattern as random as the shape of a snowflake but every bit as mathematical. The tall metal bookcases shine with the dullness of giant palm fronds. Binders full of technical material sit ready on shelves, the plastic wrapped about them bunched up like the fabric of a suit coat as it's wearer twists around in their swivel chair. Even the light is fabricated; flourescence flowing out of long gas-filled tubes like fireflies enslaved behind opaque plastic covers - pressed into service all for the matter of production production production.

And all around, even in this haven of circuitry with computers crunching numbers, yelling back and forth at eachother of the network, jockeying for the printer queue or more bandwidth over the internet line, there is paper. Paper: the most natural of human produced goods. Something about this product, this paper-thin and almost metaphysical thing, it is human indeed. Small and helpless. Fleeting and unsure of themselves, sheets float off a desk trying to escape. A printer, grabbing desperately at the last few pages in it's #2 tray goes ca-Chunk ca-Chunk ca-Chunk. The sound of paper being shuffled and straightened floats down the hallway belying the true nature of it's power. You see, the weight of the yellow pages - strength in numbers - pulls down on the crooked shelf above my desk. Paper, the peoples product, is powerful in it's ability to transmit ideas. Strength sprung forth from it's very weakness. Able to be crumpled, abused, thrown out.. yet just as easily pulled from the refuse and unfolded, the ideas scrawled upon it unraveled, understood, appreciated, absorbed.

So many of us are scared of computers I wonder if this was what it was like for paper, on the eve of it's conception so many years ago. Were people as afraid of new ideas then as they are today? Is communication and exchange such an inherently frightening idea?

While computers may not be accepted by all, while they present a face on which to project certain fears, they are here to stay. The low pink of a finger nail tapped on the glass of a monitor is a sound we should grow to love. Paper is perhaps not shuffling off it's mortal coil quite yet. There are trees to chop down still, there are books to print and banners to fly. But computers, this is the new paper - a jumble of metals and silicon dredged from the earth - this is a new platform for ideas.